RIO HONDO, Texas — Even a nature lover and wildlife tracker like Mary Jo Bogatto didn’t know what she was looking at when she slowed her truck for the turn onto her ranch and found a squashed wildcat the size of beagle on the roadside.

It was the mid-1990s, and the scientists who studied what Texas pioneers once called “leopard cats” had only confirmed the species' continued existence in the United States about a decade before.

Not many people knew about the cats, spotted night stalkers that prowl the Amazon and once lived as far north as Arkansas and in the arid mountains of Arizona. They could be mistaken for the slightly larger bobcat, which has a spotted coat but pointier, tufted ears and shorter tail.

Although they had largely disappeared from the American landscape, dozens of these skittish throwbacks remained holed up in a couple of big south Texas scrub patches, cut off from their Mexican kin.

Bogatto asked around. Her inquiries identified the roadkill by the ranch gate as an ocelot, and it changed her life.

Ocelots, like the larger jaguar, are among the American Southwest's rarest mammals, whose long-term survival north of the U.S.-Mexico border depends on a larger reservoir of animals to the south.

They live a life of mystery in the borderland shadows, evading even the eyes of the biologists who study them, except during occasional live trappings or roadkill cleanups.

In Arizona, at least occasionally, a few slink along the tree-lined mountains that rise from the Sonoran Desert, a place where they face local extinction if a border wall cuts off migration routes.

In Texas, where officials hope someday to restore already fragmented cross-border connections, they hunker down in isolated patches of brush, and die on a widening grid of rural highways.

Ocelots and the habitat they need

A caracara perched in a tree at Cactus Creek Ranch near Rio Hondo, Texas, in March 2017.(Photo: Mark Henle/The Republic)

It was one of those highway deaths that drew Bogotto to the ocelot. Without knowing it, she was already in its backyard.

She and her late husband had bought a heavily grazed cattle ranch and begun restocking it with brush and trees, making a space for critters from the nearby Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge to wander or fly by the couple's porch as they enjoyed their morning coffee. They had not seen an ocelot until that day along the road.

Now they had a critically endangered species to protect.

“After that,” the 59-year-old former hunting and fishing guide said on her porch earlier this year, “the meaning got deeper.”

Bogatto's ranch would become a place of healing, for nature and for herself after heart problems took her husband.

“It’s my everything,” she said.

She went back to planting — brittle, thorny things like goatbush and ebony, the ocelot's preferred habitat — and she enlisted the Nature Conservancy’s help with thousands of seedlings. Soon federal biologists were tracking a radio-collared ocelot across her rejuvenated land.

“These ocelots need dense brush,” Bogatto said, and she aims to provide and permanently protect as much as possible.

Biologists call it Tamaulipan thornscrub, after the Mexican state that grows more of it and is home to more of the roughly 30-pound cats. Ocelots thrive where thornscrub’s canopy covers at least 85 percent of the ground, about 1 percent of south Texas these days.

Only small pockets remain undisturbed along the Gulf Coast, leaving America’s last confirmed breeding population at high risk of extinction.

There are, at best, a couple of fur coats still roaming Texas. Before the U.S. banned the practice, furriers used up to 40 pelts per garment.

“The Texas population is precarious,” said Mike Tewes, the Texas A&M University-Kingsville biologist who, in 1982, trapped the ocelot that proved they still existed.

Without some link to Mexico — either a replanted thornscrub corridor or the gift of some transplanted cats from south of the border — biologists think the odds of survival beyond this century are long.

Video: The challenges of an ocelot-friendly habitat

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Experts at the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge and a Texas ranch owner talk about the ocelot's preferred habitat.

Ocelots a better bet for recovery

A proposed border wall won’t help. But in Texas, there are more pressing threats: traffic, in-breeding and continued development in a fast-growing corner of one of America’s fastest-growing states.

To the west, in Arizona, an impervious border wall or security fence would pose an immediate roadblock to recovery.

Five hundred or more ocelots live in eastern Sonora, Mexico, according to the Northern Jaguar Project, a group that monitors both ocelots and jaguars south of the border. At least five cats thought linked to that population have loped through Arizona ranges in the last decade.

Carmina Gutierrez is a biologist for the project. At her home in Sahuaripa, Sonora, Gutierrez sometimes wears a T-shirt depicting a Yellowstone National Park wolf. Like that species, she said, which the U.S. restored to its native Wyoming habitat in the 1990s, ocelots and jaguars have a natural place in the American West.

The southern Arizona mountains have fewer roads, people and industry than south Texas. She likes the odds if Mexico can protect and grow the adjacent Sonoran wild-cat populations.

The numbers make ocelots perhaps the likelier of the two species to resume breeding in the U.S., if they’re allowed.

A wall would cut off the ocelots now making deep incursions from Mexico into Arizona, before anyone can confirm whether they’ve come to stay. Of the handful of ocelots photographed in the state over the last decade, one died on a highway as far north as Globe, about 170 miles from the border.

“They need as much habitat as possible,” Gutierrez said. “The first thing is to leave them to cross without any barriers.”

Hilary Swarts, a biologist for the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, speaks during her ocelot presentation at the annual Ocelot Conservation Festival at the Gladys Porter Zoo, in Brownsville, Texas, on March 3, 2017. (Photo: Mark Henle/The Republic)

Pelts, pets and development

Ocelots took a different path to the brink of a U.S. extinction than their larger cousins, the jaguars. They’re too small to appear menacing or to stalk most livestock besides poultry. Unless they were chicken farmers, settlers had fewer reasons to fear them or sic government agents or bounty hunters on them, the way cattle ranchers did with jaguars.

But the little cat’s silky coat made a fine garment when stitched together, and some people — famously the surrealist painter Salvador Dali — preferred the cats as companions. Today, Laguna Atascosa biologists warn against this, “if you want to keep your face.” Ocelots are small but fierce.

The demand for pelts and pets contributed to the ocelot’s decline, but not nearly so much as Texans’ relentless drive into their scrubby habitat.

Roads carved up south Texas. Today, roadkill like the specimen Bogatto found at her gate accounts for half of known ocelot deaths. Motorists killed seven of the cats in one 11-month stretch of 2015 and 2016, taking out as much as a tenth of the population.

The industrial ports around Brownsville and the farms planted with sorghum and other crops have cut the cats off from the Rio Grande and the 1,000 or more ocelots of their subspecies in eastern Mexico. Tewes and colleagues estimate from genetic tests that they’ve been separated for at least a half century, robbing them of genes that might help them adapt as Texas experiences climate disruption or further land alterations.

“There’s going to be a change in the environment,” Tewes said. Without new blood, the ocelot’s stronghold in America will crumble.

He worked on the technical team that analyzed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ocelot-recovery plan, which determined that Texas would need 175 to 200 ocelots in three or more connected populations to have a reasonable chance at surviving the century.

Currently there are a few dozen in two populations — Laguna Atascosa and Willacy County to the north — that are effectively diced up by roads and farms. There’s no evidence of genetic swap, even between the Texas zones.

“We need to get more eggs in the basket,” Tewes said.

So far, Mexico has declined to send any of its ocelots north, though Tewes and others have worked for years to assure the country that its Tamaulipas population is secure enough to withstand the loss.

A different landscape in Arizona

A 2012 photo of an ocelot in the Huachuca Mountains.(Photo: Arizona Game and Fish Department)

In Arizona, a different subspecies that adapted to the oak woodland hills of Sonora has probed the northern fringes of its habitat in recent years. It also lives under dense canopies that filter light, though frequently is photographed in desert washes that lack the thick scrub of Texas ocelot country.

Arizona ocelot reports were sparse — 11 dead specimens and one fossil in all — before they disappeared temporarily after the 1960s. Since 2009, trail cameras and hunters with dogs have confirmed at least four living ocelots, and the fifth found on the highway in Globe in 2010.

These confirmed ocelots have roamed the Huachuca, Patagonia and Santa Rita ranges of southern Arizona.

Federal biologists working on the 2016 species recovery plan credited Arizona with embracing wildlife underpasses in highway construction. Most of the cited projects are in northern Arizona and benefit other species: elk in the White Mountains and desert bighorn sheep near Lake Mead, for example.

The opening last year of a $9.5 million set of crossings over and under State Route 77, north of Tucson, could protect ocelots wandering from the Santa Catalina Mountains to the Tortolitas, a traverse that the ocelot killed on a road at Globe might well have taken.

Death on the roadways

At this year's Ocelot Conservation Day in Brownsville, Texas, Girl Scout Troop 616 sat rapt as Sihil the ambassador cat climbed a pole and sat atop it before climbing back down face-first to a table at the Gladys Porter Zoo.

Hilary Swarts, a Laguna Atascosa refuge biologist, explained that the ocelot has a sort of double-jointed advantage over other cats, allowing it to twist its wrists so it can hang from its hooked claws while descending. It’s a trick that would save firefighters the trouble of treetop pet rescues if adventurous house cats could do it.

Swarts told the girls about the seven ocelots run over during an 11-month stretch of 2015-2016, and how she learned to relax only if no one had called by 9 a.m. to alert her to the night’s carnage. That’s about when people’s morning commutes and roadkill sightings ended.

“It got to the point where I didn’t want to answer my phone,” she said.

An ocelot crossing at the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in Texas.(Photo: Mark Henle/The Republic)

Her presentation capped Brownsville’s 17th annual ocelot celebration, an education event intended to raise awareness and some funds for the refuge’s citizen support group, which helps coordinate habitat protection.

Swarts asked Texans to slow down on the roads through the scrublands, where yellow ocelot-crossing signs mark well-traveled paths.

The girls, aged 8 to 11, were ready to spread word back home about the state’s rare wildcat.

“Their home is being taken away by houses and cities,” 10-year-old Alissa Villareal said.

The girls had sold hundreds of boxes of cookies to get themselves from the Austin area to Brownsville for Ocelot Conservation Day.

“They’re stoked to see that cat climbing up that pole,” said the scout leader, Jennifer Bloodworth.

Sihil, a pro at climbing on demand and staying calm in a crowd, came down from the Cincinnati Zoo in a van for the event.

'They have to have crossings'

The next day, a Cincinnati Zoo trainer, Lauren Kimbro, brought Sihil to Bogatto’s Cactus Creek Ranch for some photos with one of the species’ best friends.

Bogatto started the Friends of Laguna Atascosa non-profit support group, which advocates for the refuge when its federal protectors cannot, and raises money for conservation around the refuge. In the early years, she hosted the Ocelot Conservation Day that now happens down the road in Brownsville’s zoo.

Kimbro posed the ocelot in mesquites and around cactuses while Bogatto and her boyfriend, Silas Smith, cooed and shot photos in the morning light.

The cat trainer said habitat fragmentation — the virtual walling off of brush by roads and farms — threatened the ocelot’s survival in America. What an actual wall on the border might do remains to be seen.

“We don’t really know how many animals are crossing (the border) right now,” Kimbro said, “but after the wall is built, we’ll see the effects in the U.S.”

Later that morning, Bogatto and Smith showed how road crews had been upgrading the highway by the ranch to prevent more ocelot road deaths like the one she discovered years ago. They’ve elevated the road in strategic places so they could install concrete underpasses.

The tall redhead, made taller by her Texas boots and hat, stooped to walk through the 4-foot opening.

The paw prints in the mud that morning were of undetermined origin, but Bogatto said the thornscrub, mesquite bosques and yuccas on either side gave her hope that ocelots would find it an attractive passage.

Smith said a border barrier would have to include something like this, perhaps in areas with heightened surveillance to keep humans from using the cat doors.

“They have to have crossings,” he said.

“I hope so,” Bogatto agreed.

Homeland Security has not begun designing new wall segments, though would-be contractors erected competing prototypes in California this summer. The Trump administration has at times discussed a 30-foot wall, variably described as concrete or, in places, fencing.

The Endangered Species Act would seem to dictate some kind of accommodation for ocelots and other rare creatures, but a 2005 act of Congress exempted at least parts of the border zone from that and other environmental laws.

Cat doors, cat trails

In intermittent stretches there already is a steel wall along the lower Rio Grande. There also are wildlife crossings of a sort.

Tewes, the Texas A&M wildcat specialist, doubts they would draw ocelots through, even though he is, in a roundabout way, responsible for their construction along border fences starting in President George W. Bush’s administration.

At that time, Department of Homeland Security officials asked his expert opinion about whether an ocelot might fit through and use a portal measuring 8 ½ inches by 11 inches, an opening too small for immigrants and drug traffickers to squeeze through.

“I said physically, yes, I think an ocelot could get through that hole,” Tewes said.

The better question, he said, was whether ocelots could even get to the wall.

The government didn’t ponder that question and now there are regular openings the size of a standard sheet of paper at the base of the uprights.

Trouble is, there’s no habitat to lure an ocelot toward the wall. Even at Southmost Preserve, a dense tangle of would-be ocelot heaven on the Rio Grande near Brownsville, the experts say it’s unlikely an ocelot would approach. Cornfields stretch from the city to the span of steel wall that bounds the preserve, making for a vulnerable cat passage out in the open.

Coyote tracks, at least, lead to some of those rectangular holes.

The wall past there has frequent breaks allowing owners to access their lands behind it, and also allowing migrants to run through.

Some conservation-minded landowners see a dilemma between the cats and national security. Karen Hunke, who preserved a south Texas ranch before selling to add acreage to the federal refuge, said she’s unsure how to balance wildlife and the border.

“The whole immigration program is a mess,” she said, “and it’s going to take some real geniuses to figure it out.”

Other cat biologists question whether wary ocelots would use a small cat door even if excellent habitat delivered them to it. Why, they wonder, would such a hulking wall across the southern Arizona mountains look inviting to an ocelot accustomed to Sonora’s wide wilderness?

Gutierrez, the Northern Jaguar Reserve biologist, monitors trail cameras and works out of her home where that organization protects Mexican jaguar and ocelot habitat about 120 miles south of Arizona. Her computer mouse pad is a photo of her and her biologist husband standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Expansion of the cat populations into Arizona would be a good sign for conservation in Sonora, she said. But a wall would isolate any cats north of the border and eventually would keep them from persisting there without links to the larger gene pool in Mexico.

Asked whether an 8 ½-by-11 wall opening would suffice, she laughed long and hard.

“Something bigger, I think,” she finally said.

Ocelots likely wouldn’t even approach a wall to see the hole, she said. Those on the species’ arid northern fringes appear less tolerant of human structures and traffic than those in Central America, she said, though she conceded that no one has really studied how big a passage either an ocelot or a jaguar might need.

“Who knows?” she said.

Besides a wall, mineral exploration on both sides of the border worries her. Open pits could eat up habitat, poison waters and scare off nearby wildlife, she said.

In Texas, the deterrents include all manner of development that ocelot advocates in recent years have tried to turn back.

Trying to connect ocelot habitat

An ocelot kitten at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in February 2014.(Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

The Fish and Wildlife Service’s ocelot recovery plan lists thousands of acres that federal refuges and conservation partners have preserved, and hundreds of thousands more that could provide habitat and linkages in the Rio Grande Valley.

“We’re trying to connect the boxes,” said Boyd Blihovde, Laguna Atascosa refuge manager. He pointed at unprotected squares on a map showing the area between his ocelot stronghold and a series of smaller refuges nearer the river. “We don’t care who manages it.

“We want it conserved for the species. The ocelot, primarily, but others as well.”

Conservation allies, such as the Friends of Laguna Atascosa group that Bogatto started, want to provide Texas ocelots a real link to and through the border. The group’s president, outdoor educator Bob Severson, touted a recent 2,000-acre addition to the effort.

“We’re trying to make a connection so there will be genetic swap,” Severson said, so that “at least they have a corridor.”

His group joined with the Sierra Club in asking federal energy regulators to reject a liquefied natural gas exporting plant proposed for the coast near Brownsville, for its potential to scare off ocelots.

Tewes, the ocelot researcher, has sometimes dismayed advocates by contributing what he considers a voice of reason. After years of hoping to find a plausible link to the Mexican ocelots, he said, he ultimately determined that south Texas already had lost too much virgin ground to development.

A gas port won’t matter, he said, especially when it’s on ground that’s too salty to grow the kind of dense brush that Texas ocelots favor. Farms, highways and subdivisions stretch across the map from Laguna Atascosa to the Rio Grande.

“I consider this an ecologically toxic environment,” he said while running his palm over a map of the Brownsville area. “I see it getting worse.”

Better to focus conservation efforts north on grounds closer to where the Texas ocelots live, he believes, and to try to create another small satellite population or two that could interact with those cats locally. Doing so would require inducing farmers to protect brushy habitat and the prey it holds on private lands, he said.

It might mean paying farmers to coexist, in a program similar to rewards that the Northern Jaguar Project offers Sonoran ranchers when cats are photographed on their land.

Then Texas will need to convince Mexico to give it an occasional female ocelot to broaden the gene pool.

Tall, dense brush is ocelot heaven

An ocelot released after capture at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in April 2015.(Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Swarts, the refuge biologist, said the long-term goal is to connect the two Texas populations, and the “really long-term goal” is to connect with Mexico.

“In a dream world, it would all connect and they would move themselves,” she said.

It would require big patches of habitat, though they could connect through bottlenecks only dozens of feet wide if the scrub is dense enough, she said.

At an ocelot trap site on the refuge, she slithered into the brush on her belly to demonstrate how difficult — and sometimes bloody — it is to enter the ocelot’s turf.

Sometimes she must crawl in through scratchy tunnels even an enthusiastic bird dog would avoid, to find a dropped radio collar or a dead cat wearing one. She uses a GPS to find her way back out to her truck.

“This is the gold standard,” she said of the habitat: a canopy some 10 to 15 feet high except where a large mesquite rises above. The brush and its light-filtering effect is so good at hiding the spotted cats that she has never seen a live one in the wild unless she trapped it to affix a collar and take genetic samples.

On this day, the trap — two adjacent metal compartments for the cat and for live bait such as a bird — was empty. Rain in the forecast would make reaching the site across muddy roads uncertain, and she won’t bait a trap if there’s a chance she can’t reach it quickly to free the ocelot.

The camouflage is one reason chicken farmers would have had trouble wiping ocelots out of Texas.

“A cat goes in there a couple feet and good luck taking aim,” Swarts said.

The combination of the animal’s rarity and its wariness make trapping and monitoring difficult. In the previous four months, her staff caught only two in 40 traps baited five nights a week.

Another low number gave her consolation: zero road kills in nearly a year.

Wriggling out of the brush, Swarts cocked her head.

“I just smelled a cat,” she said. “Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything. They’re in the area.”

They likely wouldn’t prowl about until evening.

It's their home

A male ocelot male at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in January 2014.(Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Up and down the coast between Corpus Christi and Brownsville, rows of towering windmills blink red cautions to aircraft as they produce power for the growing region.

Bogatto, the ranch owner and former outdoor guide whose land abuts Laguna Atascosa, said her neighbors’ windmills and gravel mining have discouraged the ducks and cranes from making their way past her porch most mornings.

“I get frustrated that we don’t put animals a little closer to the head of our list,” Bogatto said. “I do, though I know people look at me a little funny sometimes.”

Animals of all kinds gave her a life of adventure as she and her late husband chased birds in Mexico and fish as far off as the Amazon, where she first learned that people killed ocelots that got into chicken coops. That was before she learned that the cats also lived in her home state.

She claims credit for being the first to attach a camera to a swimming marlin, for a National Geographic film crew.

“Everywhere we went, we taught conservation,” she said.

Her home is filled with wildlife curios, trophies — including one from the skin and bones of a fat rattlesnake she once ate — and paintings, including one of her aboard a boat in her “lucky shorts” battling a tarpon. There’s a copy of “Women Who Run with the Wolves” on an end table.

Outside is a living museum.

Smith, the boyfriend, laid out frozen chicken parts in a field to watch swarms of caracaras, yellow-faced scavengers that Texans call Mexican eagles. A bobwhite quail ran down the driveway.

Alligators have been known to lurk in the marsh across the field.

Lifting the lid from a box that had held four titmouse eggs, Bogatto winced. A snake had apparently visited and taken them.

Her efforts to replant the ranch have landed it a place on the Audubon Society’s “Great Texas Birding Trail.”

Originally, she and her husband built the ranch to double as a center for shooting sports, and they pushed soil up into a great, bullet-stopping berm that’s visible for miles around. Then, in 2005, Hurricane Dolly flooded the ranch and uprooted the shooting towers and stations they had built. The water sent wildlife scurrying for the berm.

“I called it Noah’s Ark,” she said.

“I turned to my mom and said, ‘And God said you will not be a shooting club. You’ll do conservation.’”

And so she has rebuilt a 400-acre scrubland capable of attracting the elusive and rare ocelot, and maybe getting some of them a few steps closer to a Mexican reunion.